This invention relates to psychotherapy. More particularly, this invention relates to a system for measuring and quantifying a patient's psychological condition and the progress, stasis, or retrogression thereof, and for administering pyschotherapy based on such measurements.
Costs in the health care field have grown at an alarming rate. Efforts to contain these costs through devices such as DRGs have slowed the growth of inpatient care, but total health care costs continue to escalate as the inpatient cost savings have shifted into expenditures for outpatient treatment. Meanwhile, the cost of mental health treatment has greatly outpaced general health care costs. Prior cost containment efforts have focused on inpatient costs. A case management approach has been applied to cost containment efforts. Often, much of a company's mental health costs are for inpatient treatment. However, recent trends are forcing a shift toward outpatient care. Furthermore, simply decreasing the amount of mental health coverage is not an attractive alternative, since poorly treated employees typically work less effectively and have increased absenteeism. Moreover, the families of such employees typically use the general health care system at an increased rate.
Mental health care may be characterized by two characteristics of overriding importance: the cost of the care, and the results or benefits of the care. Although cost is easily measured, treatment outcomes and the benefits of mental health care have been difficult if not impossible to measure. Accordingly, efforts to improve the system for delivering mental health care have focused on cost, the only measured variable in the system. Since the cost parameter can be measured, systems which minimize cost tend to be rewarded without regard to the unknown effect of cost minimizing measures on patient care. Efforts to control costs include restricting access to mental health care; a case manager may encourage providers to deny care altogether or to terminate care as early as possible. However, without a reasonably accurate and objective method of evaluating cases, a case manager or other interested person is unable to rationally allocate the limited resources for psychotherapy among those who demand it. For instance, extensive resources may be allocated to patients who would show limited or no improvement even after extended treatment, while resources may be denied to patients who would show substantial improvement with limited treatment. Moreover, without such a method the case manager or other interested person cannot rationally determine which providers should be engaged to provide the most cost-effective and appropriate treatment in an individual case or on an overall basis. Lacking an ability to measure psychotherapy outcomes, efforts to select a provider and a course of therapy have focused on process measures, i.e. measures which attempt to infer the effect of therapy from characteristics of the therapy process such as the credentials of the provider. Too often the therapy approved and provided to a patient is made to fit the insurance or other benefits available to the patient, rather than the patient's condition. In contrast, in physical health care there are numerous lab tests which can accurately diagnose a physical illness and may be used to determine patient response, individually or on a group statistical basis, to particular courses of medical or surgical treatment. Although physical health care costs have continued to rise, the availability of such tests and outcome measures have enabled case managers in that field to more rationally determine when a treatment is necessary or appropriate for a condition and allocate limited physical health care resources.